One of the more important things that's landed in my lap is the whole tax thing. We have our taxes done. For one thing, it's more than enough work just to gather the materials for our tax preparer. For another thing, our taxes are pretty complicated. For a third thing, having audit assistance gives me huge peace-of-mind. And lastly, our income sources are very untidy.
We may have to defer part of our taxes this time around. How do we do that? I haven't a clue. That would take research. Why would we defer taxes? Well, because if someone earns their income out of the USA under certain contracts for a certain amount of time, then they don't have pay taxes on a certain amount of income. Well what if that certain amount of time out of the country within a year doesn't tidily fall within a given tax year? If you're only in the USA 352 days out of 365, for example, but those 352 out of 365 days fall between April 2012 and May 2013, what's a tax preparer to do? The gov'mint can't just take the tax payer's word for it that the rest of the time will in fact show up as being outside the USA the following year. So, they do this thing. And I'm not familiar with this thing they do.
So our already complicated taxes with two separate businesses plus two 'normal' incomes through regular hourly wage jobs has stepped up to a whole new level of weird. I don't have to mess with it if I don't want to, so I won't.
And I get to write the prep fee off on next year's taxes, just like the prep fee from last year will come off this year's taxes. It's sort of like that marble machine with the chutes and ramps and the arm that swings round and the little cable car and so forth. (BTW, these are called gravitrams, and we have a beautiful one in Portland, OR at OMSI.)
Gardening sidenote: We have daffodils! Finally! Just the miniature ones so far (they're about the size of crocuses) but the big ones are well on their way. I'm hoping the first big ones will open sometime this week.
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